She found an error in the palace accounts.
Fixed it.
Said nothing.
He found out from Aldric anyway.
That was the thing about Aldric.
He paid attention to everything.
It started with a question she asked Aldric about the east wing heating costs.
A practical question — the east wing ran cold in the mornings and she had been wondering, in the systematic way she wondered about things, whether it was a structural issue or an accounting one.
Aldric answered the question. Then, with the careful neutrality of a man leaving a door open, showed her the relevant ledger page.
Nora looked at it.
Then she looked at the three pages before it.
Then the twelve pages before those.
There it is, she thought.
An error in the fuel allocation records — small, compounding, three years old. Not fraud. Not negligence. Simply a miscalculation that had never been caught because no one had ever looked at the surrounding pages simultaneously.
She fixed it. Noted the correction in the margin in her neat handwriting. Closed the ledger. Returned it to Aldric. Went back to the library.
She did not mention it to anyone.
Malik came to find her that afternoon.
He stood in the library doorway with his arms crossed and the expression he had when he was working through something that had surprised him.
"You corrected the east wing accounts," he said.
"There was an error," she said, without looking up.
"A three-year-old error that my entire accounting staff missed."
"It was easy to miss if you only looked at individual pages," she said. "You have to look at the context around a number to understand what the number is actually doing."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Why didn't you tell me?" he asked.
"I didn't do it for credit," she said. "I did it because it was wrong and I could fix it."
He looked at her steadily.
He doesn't know what to do with that, she noted. He's surrounded by people who do things for credit. Who announce every small act so it can be filed under their name.
"The annual saving is significant," he said.
"I know," she said. "That's why I fixed it."
He stood in the doorway a moment longer. Then he came in and sat in his chair and opened his book.
He didn't say thank you. She didn't expect him to.
We understand each other, she thought. That's enough.